


the floor, walls and windowsill

by binbag



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, mention of canon typical torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 04:28:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4421333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binbag/pseuds/binbag
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rymrgrand played a slow game with her, almost as if knowing she would turn from him as soon as her mother had set her down upon the steps of his great temple in the White. The long winter would claim her life eventually, but not before she danced to the whims of all the pantheon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the floor, walls and windowsill

'What is it you're headed to Gilded Vale for, anyway?' Calisca asks through the gloom.

Anduril looks up through under her hood from the worn path at the other woman's back. 'What is there to want there?'

'Well, the magistrate's offering is decent. It's not a bad living, if the lord's lookin' to expand trade like they say. You could settle down, watch the place grow up around you.'

'Haven't ever really thought of myself as the settling type.'

Calisca looks to be of an age with Anduril, by her own estimate. Although no human would ever look at the two women and guess as much, given that most kith in the small settlements where Anduril did business seldom came across a pale elf. She didn't have the furrows of worry etched into the center of her brow or the corners of her eyes that a human woman of her age would have, and most didn't see past her coiled braid of white hair or her stark white skin. Anduril had been dedicated as a child to the great frozen temples of The White That Wends for twenty five years, and the next ten on the road away from it.

Home was a long way behind her, and had always meant looking back into yawning, dark halls. The endless rites, circles drawn up upon the floors of ice, back ramrod straight, stomach having been empty for near a week, lungs full of the brittle, cutting polar air. Crushing boredom with anxious energy chewing at the corners of her mind. All so that her body might be open for a snatch of divine sight. 

'Gilded Vale's got the space for it, anyway. Get married and settled down. They might gawp a bit, but otherwise everyone's sick of looking at their cousin and their cousin's cousins.' Caslisca offers halfheartedly.

'If you say so.' Anduril says, too ill and irritated to entertain this conversation. It wasn't the first time she'd been needled by a bored caravan guard, nor would it be the last. 

'A straight shot is always needed in the Vale. Hunters got fat off the harvest over the years and too drunk to shoot straight when times were good. Too many years of that and they get the shakes, drunk or not. Now that the crops are failing, I'm sure they'd welcome some fresh game for trade.'

'Sounds like.'

'Or, y'know, I bet you could make a good coin or two from the local housewives. I bet the lousy hens would beat a path to your doorstep to have you peer at some tea leaves. Tell some fortunes.'

The slight breeze was too warm, the late summer this year was unseasonably hot. Anduril bites her tongue on the verge of snappishness. She is tired, and sick, and had been hunted by a weariness that she could not shake. The only familiar smells to her was the dry winter and hunting.

The road had sufficed to keep her hands busy. Anduril had never given thought to anything other than the distance she had put on the road behind her. She worked, she fed herself, she moved on. The momentum was enough.

Before either woman could venture into another vaguely uncomfortable conversation, their attention is drawn to Gascoigne trotting quickly into the light cast by Calisca's torch. Calisca moves aside, made seemingly nervous by the overlarge wolf uncannily in sync with the uncanny, weird elf. Gascoigne trots to stand along Anduril's flank, looking ahead on the road towards camp.

Calisca peers back at her, 'Trouble?'

'Yes,' she lays a hand on Gascoigne's neck and sets along the road again, forcing herself into a quicker pace into the darkness, with the wolf following on her heels. Calisca wordlessly resumes her position on the point of their party, anxiously tugging at the fastenings of her gear.

Anduril knew the camp was lost as soon as Gascoigne could smell the blood. It was another matter to see the unarmed merchants butchered from one end of the clearing through to the other. The only thing she would be glad for that day would be her two survivors; Heodan with his pack of supplies, and the infuriated Calisca, who was a good of a sword arm as Anduril might have hoped for, as she fires arrows from higher ground. The Glanfathans were clearly not expecting much of a fight from the small caravan, and had been routed easily enough once they lost the advantage.

 

/////////////////////////

 

The freak storm – the biawic still rattling the teeth in her skull and her bones in their sockets, she ignores her two fellow survivors as they descended into bickering. She pulls her hair away from her face, suddenly hollowly furious at everything for the want of a real target. The idiot merchant should have set down stakes across the river, he should have hired more caravan guards, or at least enough people to clear a singular fallen tree from the road. What had she eaten to make her so sick? She should have left Calisca in the darkness once she had her idiot fishwives' cure for her aching gut. She cursed her aimless, pointless wandering, without a care where her next job might take her, her constantly empty purse, her stubborn refusal to stay still for even a moment lest the awful Beast gain on her--

Resting on her haunches, she feels sicker still, now that the adrenaline had worn off, and the gravity of their situation has settled upon her. The merchant had some supplies in his pack, but there was no telling what lay in store further through the temple, whether it be bandits as Calisca seemed so certain of, or just closed in tunnels, with no way out.

Well. No point in crossing that bridge to despair until she came to it, anyway.

With Heodan slung across her shoulders and Calisca furiously cutting down any bizarre temple remnant that moved ahead of them, and Anduril painstakingly disarming the truly awful traps in their way, the three survivors stagger their way through the broken down temple.

 

/////////////////////////

 

She's sick from the feeling of her hands on her face – fingers that are longer, softer than she knows them to be, she's sick from feeling her _own_ fingers on her scalp while she's watching them flex into the dirt. Calisca's blood has gotten under her fingernails, pooled on the ground where her blonde head was dashed open. Unconsciously, Anduril finds herself unwittingly making the gesture of thanks for Rymrgrand's passing mercy that Calisca's facing away from her – such an old superstitious motion that comes through her unconsciously, unthinkingly.

She doesn't smell any smoke but in the distance on the raised steps there are – infidels, apostates writhing on their pyres, and her empty stomach sets to heaving and gasping. Anduril, her face in the dirt, in the sticky, drying blood, for the very first time, finds herself weeping for home – not the cold numbing empty stone temples, not the old chanting fasting monks, but her mother's hearth, her mother's wooden comb through her hair before bed, her mother's warm, soft arms holding the dreams away, her mother's greatly embellished hunting tales before Anduril starting seeing the faces in the snow squalls, see the Beast Of Winter stalk through the blizzards.

She was too soft for the final rite of initiation, she had hesitated too long before the sacrificial initiate, the long, sharpened spike of ice cut from the oldest parts of the temple walls themselves melting in her hands that she had thought had been too cold for years to hold any warmth again, the ice melting and dripping into the initiates bare white chest, already still as death.

She walked away from the Rymrgrand's great stone table and walked away into the storm that had set upon the White as she had said weeks before it would. Fine for Anduril, she had not been warm since her mother had taken her on her back to the steps of the temple as an offering to the cold god, she had gone longer without eating in her time of meditation in the time it took her to go home. But Rymrgrand played a slow game with her, almost as if knowing she would turn away from him as soon as her mother had set her down on the steps before the clerics, because her mother's solitary dwelling was cold and empty but for her old wolf that had grown thin, her oldest longbow and little else where she had raised her daughter alone those precious few years. 

Her mother had gone, and had gone a long time ago.

Her mother had wandered, hunting, before coming to home to the wasteland to have her daughter where she herself had been born. Anduril picked over the remains of what things her mother had left behind to freeze in the long winter, holding old memories to her chest, only to find that these things no longer held any comfort for her without her mother to make them warm. Her cold hands wiping away her tears before they could freeze on her face, she set herself in the direction of the sea, as her mother had told her she herself had done, before she had Anduril, many dozens of years ago, when the new world was still new and she left home.

 

/////////////////////////

 

Eventually, it's Gascoigne's cold nose on the back of her neck that brings her back to the present, but her fists in her eyes cannot wipe away the specters of the wretches through the damp soup of fog. Anduril feels like half a person, clinging onto her soul with her teeth lest it fly out through her mouth. Leaning heavily on her mother's wolf, she finds the path south through the hot summer rain and stays to the road -- she knows once she loses the trail for a second time, she will not have the energy to set herself right again. 

Even from a distance and through the mist, Gilded Vale didn't look to live up to its name. Up close, underneath the hanging tree, Anduril feels a fresh wave of nausea. The magistrate's sneering, the corpses rotting, bloated and stinking in the rain and the heat, Anduril's itching feet and instincts to keep moving screaming at her were dulled only by the bone-deep, sagging exhaustion and sleep deprived paranoia and hallucinations. The blonde farmer nonchalantly smoking his pipe not a stone's throw away from the horrible tree had pointed her towards the inn, where she falls unwashed and fully clothed into the mildewy mattress, and sleeps.

And of course, _of course_ , she dreams of that horrible tree, and a dead dwarf woman, and Anduril, a woman grown wails in despair as she jolts from her dream and realizes that not even the whole day had passed and that she is still exhausted. A headache is crawling its way up her neck radiates through her skull, screaming through her scalp. She flings an arm underneath the bed to find the chamberpot, and heaves the meager meal of hard bread and onions into it. She wipes the back of her hand over her sour tasting mouth before falling back into the grasp of her uneasy, frantic dreams. 

**Author's Note:**

> y'all can find this over on [tumblr](http://binbagwrites.tumblr.com/) as well this is going to take me forever to write. on top of being an abysmal writer, i also move at a truly glacial pace. on that note, i am the worst proofreader on the planet. if you notice anything out of place or a typo i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks for reading!!


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